A step-by-step guide to designing an efficient and effective hybrid office.
A well-designed office can reduce costs (by up to a third), enhance employee satisfaction and productivity, and promote sustainability.
New hybrid working trends have brought challenges in understanding how employees utilise office spaces – many expensive offices have been built only to lie unused, haemorrhaging money, emitting carbon and stifling productivity.
In order to address these challenges, it is crucial for organisations to make sure the space requirements of their office users are fully understood. Through data-driven decisions, organisations can design offices that efficiently meet their employees’ requirements and expectations, thus ensuring the office is an attractive – and productive – proposition for their staff.
Below, we provide a complete guide on to how to comprehensively understand your office user needs, and to then use this information to design an efficient and effective office space. Read on to start your office design journey!
If you’re still considering whether a new office or redesign is worth it, you can use this savings calculator tool to estimate how much a right-sized office could save you, both in cash and carbon emissions.
Often overlooked, the Strategise step refers to the process of collecting information about your user requirements and expectations. This crucial step enables you to make confident, data-driven decisions when it comes to designing your office. Without it, you are just guessing what your users need, and are unlikely to end up with an efficient or effective office.
The strategy step can be broken down into two main phases:
By the end of this process, you’ll understand:
First, you’ll need a complete list of employees (including remote workers). Ideally, you’ll enrich this with metadata such as department, managers, roles, and any other salient information – this will enable you to aggregate requirements across varying subsections of your organisation, which will inform your space calculations (see below). You can use any spreadsheet tool for this task.
Next, you need to understand the requirements of your users. You will use this information to calculate how much space you need in the next step. Your output should be a wide range of quantitative data which reflects your user needs.
You should collect information such as:
Now you understand your user requirements, the next step is to use that data to calculate the amount and types of space your office needs. The output should be a list of rooms and square footage which will allow your employees to work effectively whilst keeping overall costs low.
Estimating these figures yourself is cheap, but time-consuming and - due to the complexity of the task - likely to contain inaccuracies. At the end of this section we discuss where to find support if you want faster and more accurate calculations.
Follow the steps below to calculate your space demand. You can use any spreadsheet software to achieve this:
Decide if you will estimate space requirements by employee, team or department. Create your desired structure in your spreadsheet software (to simplify this, you may want to just focus on team or department level, although this will result in a less accurate prediction than if you estimate space per employee and aggregate up).
Compile a list of room types you wish to see in your new office. For example - different sizes of meeting rooms, different styles of workspaces, kitchens, breakout spaces etc. For each, estimate capacity and square footage required.
Next, take the information you ascertained from surveying your users in step 1, and use this to derive a system for estimating space.
You’ll need basic rules to assign rooms to users - for example, for every 10 employees, you want a small meeting room, 8 full-time workstations and 2 hot-desk workstations.
These will need to be weighted by more complex rules in order to get a workably accurate estimation - for example, if one employee only uses the office on Monday-Wednesday, and another uses it Thursday-Friday, you can allocate 50% space for each of those employees (ignoring this rule could make your office design up to twice as big as it needed to be, illustrating the important of modelling your user requirements accurately!).
The exact rules you make will depend on the information you obtained in step 1, standards for your industry, and what type of space you want to build.
You can now use the rules you defined in step 3 to assign your employees, departments or teams to rooms. This will tell you how many rooms you need in your new office, and adding the estimated size for all those rooms gives you a target square footage.
Note that this information is static at a single point in time, so if your situation or workforce changes, you will need to complete this exercise again to get up-to-date figures.
If the above process seems complex (don’t worry, it is!), another option is to engage expert assistance to help with your office design. This is a good way to get more accurate calculations, save time and – depending on the method used – money as well.
Consultants can assist you in office design. This will not come cheap, as they typically charge between €900-€1,400 per day, with projects usually lasting 3-6 months or more (and often running past the targeted delivery time).
The plans and analysis provided to you by a consultant are a one-off, and will go out of date quickly – if you plan on reorganising or further expanding within the next few years, you will need to budget for further rounds of consulting to make sure your information is current.
You also need to choose your consultant carefully – many (even bigger names) will not undertake adequate user needs analysis, and will instead resort to their own spreadsheet with “best guess” values, resulting in sub-optimal results.
If you want to avoid high consultancy fees whilst still achieving fast, accurate space calculations, you can try spaciv, our AI-powered workplace strategy tool.
spaciv’s AI has analysed thousands of industry-standard office patterns, user requirements and room types, and uses that information to automatically calculate your ideal office layout.
All you need to do is bulk-upload a list of your employees (or integrate with your HR software to get this information automatically), and within minutes you’ll have an office design tailored to your user needs.
However, if you want to use data more specific to your organisation, it is all fully customisable – from the integrated survey function allowing you to easily collect your own user requirements data, to the types of room the algorithm considers when designing your layouts.
To see a quick demo of how space demand can be calculated in under 3 minutes in spaciv, click here.
One key advantage of using spaciv over a consultant is that your information is always up to date. The specification – of your organisational structure, requirements or desired office type – can be easily altered, and you will see the output within minutes, without having to pay consultancy fees or running over project deadlines. Integrating with your HR tool will completely automate your workplace strategy workflow, enabling you to continuously monitor how well your employees’ space requirements are being met.
Below is a comparison of the pros and cons of the various approaches outlined above:
Once you have completed these steps, you will have a good idea of what your space requirements are for your office, both in square footage and the number and types of rooms you require for your employees to work effectively.
If you would like some help with your hybrid office design, visit our Start Now page to speak to an office design expert, or try the application for free!